Arena Profile: Jeremy Lott

Jeremy Lott is editor of RealClearReligion.org and author of William F. Buckley (Thomas Nelson, 2010).

Jeremy Lott's Recent Discussions

Political predictions for 2011

Predictions for 2011:

John Boehner will cry, publicly. Nancy Pelosi will want to cry.

Harry Reid will vote against something he was supposed to vote for; Mitch McConnell will smile about this; nobody will be able to tell.

Barack Obama will set a new world record for number of words uttered publicly by a president; Barack Obama will set a new world record for number of words uttered privately by a president; Bill Clinton will dispute the award.

Birthers will seize on a misplaced comma when Obama's Hawaiian birth certificate is released; the Russian government will that charge WikiLeaks is an American plot.

Is Obama right on Michael Vick?

Let's get this out of the way first: as a nominal Redskins fan, I will never forgive Michael Vick. However, I don't see the problem in the president sounding off on the subject of his hiring, either in private or in public.

Maybe it's worth pointing out that Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie did not hire Vick out of the sheer goodness of his heart but because of Vick's impressive record on the field before his ... unsavory extracurricular activities resulted in jail time. As that moral philosopher Adam Smith reminded us, "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

The right penalty for Rangel?

I'd say the chances are nil, but that's what I thought about health care reform. At the end of the day, I figured, Democrats would realize that passing the bill would erase their party's gains of the last few election cycles and blink. Wrong! Now the same Democratic majority is threatening to take up immigration reform before many members get ushered back into the private sector. If they want to do it, they've got the votes.

I will point out, however, that two things are working against reform. One, quite a few Democratic senators would like to be reelected in 2012. Two, they've just had a graphic demonstration of what can happen to elected officials who ignore the stubborn will of American voters.

RNC chairman Michael Steele a short-timer?

Cuts to Social Security and defense politically viable?

George W. Bush has put us in a spot here. Torture is intrinsically evil, and illegal. Waterboarding falls under most reasonable definitions of torture. It is one thing to quietly allow waterboarding in a few extreme cases, to save lives. It is another thing to publicly defend those actions, as Bush has decided to do.

At the same time, I honestly don't know what good a special prosecutor would make. Here you have a former president who insists that torture is not torture, and he's too stubborn to budge. I suspect that something like an absolute majority of Americans agree with his decision to give the OK, so good luck with any indictments. We've already had a special prosecutor engage in semantic quibbles with an American executive, most famously over the meaning of the word "is." Do we really want to go through all that again?

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